On the Road to Kandahar: Travels Through Conflict in the Islamic Worldby Jason BurkeAllen Lane £20, pp320

No one knows how Britain's Nato adventure in Afghanistan will turn out. Depending on who you listen to, it is one of the most dangerous policing roles of the new age of asymmetric warfare, or merely consolidates the post-9/11 achievements there of the international community. Military commanders who pick up Jason Burke's Road to Kandahar are likely to be persuaded that it is the former. Burke reminds us that no outside interference in Afghanistan can be regarded in isolation and he shows that is a consequence of Western actions before and, critically, after the attacks on New York and Washington.

From Algeria to Thailand, Burke, formerly The Observer's chief reporter in the region, moves through every quadrant of Islam, drawing out profound differences between the communities. This is no homogeneous surge of Muslims massing to rise as one against the West. His vivid contacts with Kurdish, Arab and Asian Muslims reveal complex issues, inter-communal and international, that far outstrip the 'war on terror's' capacity to provide analysis or answers.

Many of us used to understand that the epicentre of Muslim discontent resided in and around the territories occupied by Israel after the 1967 and 1973 Middle East wars. Today, the mayhem in Gaza and the West Bank is but a bit-part player in the wider conflict. The six-decade battle to protect Israel has become a kind of war in which America and her allies have left the Israelis in the shade. While Israeli interests, tactics and 'expertise' remain active in US political, strategic and military echelons, the 'war on terror' itself is wider than anything since the end of the Second World War.

In the West, it may look like war in the spurts we see on TV, but it does not feel like the one our parents and grandparents emerged from in the Forties. Only on 11 September 2001 did it feel like that, and then only for a moment.

But to the Islamic world, what was happening long before 9/11, and what was vastly ramped up after it, feels daily more and more like war, war in the overwhelming physical and emotional sense that so many felt with Germany and Japan in the Thirties and Forties. The great weight of the Islamic world resides well to the east of the Arab world, in Iran, Pakistan, India, Indonesia and the Philippines. The long Arab-Israeli conflict has resulted in a Palestinian exodus that has expressed itself in a secular diaspora that made new lives anywhere from Manhattan to Kuwait. The new, asymmetric world has resulted in the radicalisation of entire Islamic communities. It expresses itself from Tipton to Timor and involves hundreds of millions of people. It feeds on the communications networks spawned by the same globalisation that seeks for the West ever more energy and raw materials and ever more security of supply for both.

America and her allies think that this war is about terror. But Muslims increasingly perceive that it is about them. In the early stages, the enemy was seen as Arab. Yet the only Arabs fighting in Afghanistan in the Eighties were those lured there by American funding, Osama bin Laden included. Today, the enemies are not only the Saudis the CIA has paid, but Somalis, Sudanese, Algerians, Afghans, Pakistanis and more.

We in the West have lost sight of the scale of this war and the states laid waste by it. Worse, we are even losing interest in the states where our forces are hunkering down for the 'long haul'. How are Western populations ever to be engaged by the fight conducted in their name? The 'enemy' is engaged every waking minute. The mullahs do not exaggerate when they tell their flocks that the victims are Muslim. So a war of which Westerners are ignorant or bored is one about which Muslims in vast numbers are very deeply concerned.

The story of Western deaths from terrorism, which fuels Western leaders' justification of the war, does not fit readily into the account that most Muslims are hearing. The 'war on terror' has resulted in considerable Islamic loss of life, recorded nightly on TV across the Muslim world. Beyond 9/11 itself, Western loss of life has been extraordinarily light; were it not so, Western societies would have spoken. It is easy for British and American leaders to say that Iraq is the better for the overthrow of Saddam. But the Muslims he murdered were largely unseen, while those who have died since are all too easily evidenced.

Burke is not the first to identify the folly of mythologising al-Qaeda into a Soviet-scale monolith with a capacity to destroy the West. But what he does more effectively than most is to use the personal experience of a decade and a half of reporting across the Islamic world to identify the consequences of the West's flawed response to 9/11.

He points to the comfort that the West's obsession with al-Qaeda has given unsavoury regimes around the world. 'For governments such as those of Algeria, Uzbekistan, the Philippines and Russia', he writes, 'attributing long-running local insurgencies to al-Qaeda, the newly discovered international bogeyman, was extremely useful, simultaneously releasing a flood of diplomatic, military and financial aid from Washington while also obscuring the role their own corruption, nepotism, repression and mismanagement had played in fomenting violence.'

The effect of 9/11 has been vastly to increase and reinforce the masses ranged against Western interests. Mark the developing relations between China and the Islamic world: a Saudi king visited Beijing for the very first time only last month. Burke warns that we proceed along our violent road at our peril. Complaining that we don't have enough forces in the field is the wrong answer. There really must be a better way than bombing people in resource-rich Muslim lands to realise the better lives to which they, like us, aspire.